The downfall of the great Italian cult cinema was largely caused by an endless stream of hopelessly inept Sci-Fi/action flicks during the second half of the 1980s. These were shameless imitations of blockbuster hits like "The Terminator", "Blade Runner", "Robocop", "Rambo" or "Predator", but unlike during the seventies or early eighties, the Italians somehow became uninspired, lazy and exaggeratedly amateurish so that their once glorious rip-offs suddenly became pathetic low-budget flicks that almost were almost instantly exiled to the lowest shelves of insolvent video stores! True story, I assure you, and "CY Warrior" is the prototypic example of this sad trend. This was supposed to be a fun and exhilarating "The Terminator/Robocop" rip-off, but due to the imbecilic script and unimaginably clumsy post-production work, it turned out to be a B- movie disaster that even soiled the career of the great Henry Silva. Blond poster boy Frank Zagarino stars as a hi-tech and secretly developed cyborg that escapes from his freezer on a military research vessel. The US government promptly sends out a team of soldiers to destroy him, led by the sadist Hammer (Silva) who doesn't mind using heavy artillery in places crowded with innocent civilians and making lots of collateral damage. The incredibly annoying teenage kid Brandon discovers the wounded cyborg in the woods and takes it back home to his 18-year- old sister Susan. Instead of wondering what the hell a cyborg is doing in their living room, they teach him how to eat hamburgers (by the way, this has got to be the single most retarded sequence of the entire eighties), how to shop for ugly clothes and – of course – how to dance! The girl naturally also falls more or less in love with the cyborg and repeatedly states that she – and I quote – "keeps forgetting that he isn't a real human being". Personally, I find that rather impossible to believe, especially since the cyborg makes a conspicuous mechanical noise every single time he turns his head. So, we are to believe that he is a state-of-the-art piece of intelligent engineering whose stomach is even adapted to processing actual food, but somehow they can't make his head move in silence. Meanwhile, Henry Silva keeps annihilating innocent bystanders and shouting "I don't give a good God damn!" The shootout sequences are pretty tame and there's a shortage of gore, with the exception of a blatant imitation of a famous "Terminator" scene where the cyborg fixes the burning wounds on its own face. Writer/director Giannetto De Rossi delivered fantastic work as principal make-up artist for the films of Lucio Fulci ("The Beyond", "Zombie 2") and other acclaimed horror directors, but perhaps he shouldn't have moved to the director's chair himself. In short, if you're looking for a B-movie disaster with laughable stunts, horrendous English dubbing and an absolutely retarded melodramatic climax, I highly recommend "CY Warrior".
Review of Cy Warrior
